Disparities in Wealth Accumulation and Loss from the Great Recession and Beyond
- (pp. 240-44)
Abstract
Using over two decades of Survey of Consumer Finances data and a pseudo-panel technique, we measure the impact of the Great Recession on US family wealth relative to the counterfactual of what wealth would have been given wealth accumulation trajectories. Our synthetic cohort-level models find that the Great Recession reduced average family wealth by 28.5 percent–nearly double the magnitude of previous pre-post mean descriptive estimates and double the magnitude of any previous recession since the 1980s. The housing market was only part of the story; all major wealth components fell as a result of the Great Recession.Citation
McKernan, Signe-Mary, Caroline Ratcliffe, Eugene Steuerle, and Sisi Zhang. 2014. "Disparities in Wealth Accumulation and Loss from the Great Recession and Beyond." American Economic Review, 104 (5): 240-44. DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.5.240Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D14 Household Saving; Personal Finance
- D31 Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
- D15 Intertemporal Household Choice; Life Cycle Models and Saving
- E32 Business Fluctuations; Cycles
- G01 Financial Crises